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Nov. 14, 2008 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:14
November 14, 2008, Friday, Hour #2
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And hello once again, everybody.
I am Jason Lewis, Minnesota's real anchor man, talent on loan from Rush Today.
He will be back Monday playing a little golf this weekend, as you all know.
But El Rushbo back here in the Attila the Hun chair come Monday.
In the meantime, Minnesota's Mr. Wright will try to hold down the forts.
In this second hour now, up and running on an open line Friday, 1-800-282-28A2, we've been talking about this Senate race here in Minnesota between Al Franken.
That's right.
Pinch yourself.
He's running for the U.S. Senate and he may win.
Pretty scary stuff.
We've got Al Franken and incumbent Republican Norm Coleman in this hard-fought battle up here and the shenanigans that may or may not be going on, to be fair.
I mean, it's just, as John Lott and others have pointed out, primarily John, though, it is such a massive statistical improbability the way these votes are being found in three precincts out of 4,100, especially given the parameters with these optical scanning machines that a lot of people are suspicious.
So the recount begins, and we're going to determine the voter intent.
In 2000, there was a much less contested Senate race, and there were 19,000 undervotes.
Now, an undervote, if you go back to your 2000 Florida memory, an undervote is where somebody votes for one candidate, but they skip a race.
Nothing unusual about this.
It happens all the time, especially if you've got a very, very provocative candidate in one race.
You've got a situation in Minnesota where Barack Obama was polling much higher than Al Franken.
So the votes come in on election night, and, well, lo and behold, Franken gets a lot fewer votes.
Well, so what?
Well, that's what they're banking on, that as this recount process goes forward, that they can say, well, gosh, this oval really wasn't filled in on this ballot, but we think they intended to vote for Franken.
I mean, they voted for Obama.
And in the spirit of counting all the votes, letting the voters be counted, let's count them all, we're going to count that one for Al.
And that's what's going to happen.
Instead of hanging Chad's, we've got ovals you fill in, like an old test you took in high school or SAT score or something like that.
Now, you know, unless you're an idiot or a member of Congress, you know how to fill these things in, and they give you instructions at the polling place.
And if you fill them in improperly, the machine rejects the votes.
So why would anybody not have instantaneous feedback and say, oh, got to redo this ballot?
They would.
So why are we finding ballots?
Why are we even counting them in this regard?
There is a case to be made for that.
As I said in the first hour, I think this is going to end up in court in a truly contested election.
We also had the question of absentee ballots being found in somebody's car.
The Democrats deny it, but they won't tell anybody where they had the ballots, where they were for a couple of days until they showed up.
This stuff just smells to high heaven.
You can't have this many votes, all the votes being found, basically going to Franken and none going to Coleman.
In fact, he had 65 votes taken away in one particular instance.
That defies probability.
So that's the status up here.
And it means something for the U.S. Senate.
It means whether we'll have a filibuster-proof Senate so the Democrats can ramrod through a whole host of things, not to mention an insidious tax plan, which will turn our quote-unquote recession today.
You know, that's the question we've got with regard to the economic downturn.
Is this going to be 1982 when Reagan got us out of a recession?
Or is it going to be 1932 when Roosevelt exacerbated it?
That's right.
I said when Roosevelt exacerbated it.
The biggest myth in economics, the biggest myth in history is FDR's New Deal got us out of the Great Depression.
And here we are, Barack Obama on the cover of some magazine with FDR's hat.
Is it Barack Obama's New Deal?
Let us hope it isn't.
Let me give you a little quick summary of what happened.
In 1929, we had the market crash after a number of successful years with one of the most underrated presidents we've had, Calvin Coolidge.
But we did have an expansion of the money supply, regardless of that bubble.
In 1929, you had a market crash, but that still wouldn't have meant a recession, let alone a depression.
We've had market crashes in 1987, you remember the big one.
Herbert Hoover, who has this, once again, this reputation of being a laissez-faire president, nothing could be further from the truth.
Herbert Hoover was an interventionist, a liberal in today's terms.
That was before FDR destroyed the word liberal.
You know, liberal used to mean someone who believed in liberty.
A classical liberal believes in free thought, in free markets.
FDR came along and kind of usurped the word, and now liberals mean the opposite, big government.
Regardless, Hoover raised tariffs, smoot Hawley.
Other countries retaliated.
Indeed, the number of exports declined by billions after this tariff went into effect, costing a number of Americans jobs.
He then raised income taxes.
Then Hoover increased massively government spending.
By 1932, we're still stuck.
Along comes FDR.
He doubles down on this.
Indeed, the New Deal programs, the National Industrial Recovery Act, failed to make a dent in the Depression.
You want evidence?
By 1938, we had an unemployment rate of still almost 20%.
And there's a fundamental reason for this.
Governments can't create wealth.
Government is a zero-sum game.
So all of these bailouts, all of these stimulus packages will not do a thing to increase demand without reducing demand someplace else.
Deficit-financed rebate schemes are merely shuffle around economic resources.
Deficit-financed infrastructure projects has the government taking capital in the markets, investing it in the bridge to nowhere, instead of that capital going to some entrepreneur in his garage who's going to create something of value.
What we're talking about is government's first role in the economy, and that is to foster production.
It is not to increase demand.
It is to have an environment where people can produce.
That will increase demand.
Supply increases demand.
Because when you produce something, you can create your own demand.
I think it was John Stewart.
It wasn't Mill, it was Say's Law that initially said that, John Baptist Say.
And it's as old as scripture.
And yet, what have we done?
What have we done?
Think about where we are in this particular economic cycle.
Yesterday, we had a one-day rally, as Kit likes to call it.
Now we're down 323 points today.
Everybody's worried about the economy, as they should be.
Well, go back and take a look at what we've done.
We essentially told everybody in the mortgage business, don't worry about whom you lend to.
Doesn't matter.
The government made a malinvestment with fiat money, primarily Federal Reserve money, but with some fiscal policy as well, in subprime lending.
They said, we don't care who you lend to, mortgage companies, because guess what?
Freddie and Fannie, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae will buy the junk bonds.
We'll buy, actually not bonds, but the mortgages.
So you had groups like Countrywide giving sweetheart deals to Kent Conrad, giving sweetheart deals to Chris Dodd, giving sweetheart deals to Franklin Rains and Fannie, Jamie Gorlick, James Johnson, Daniel Mudd.
They got these sweetheart deals, the friends of Angelo.
But Countrywide didn't care if they made a risky loan.
They didn't care if they were in the subprime market and the whole thing was going to collapse when people couldn't pay back the mortgage and when the balloon exploded, when the arm was up, because they shoved off all of their bad debt on Freddie and Fannie.
And then it got worse.
We not only had this quasi-public company, Freddie and Fannie, we guaranteed them that don't worry, if you get the bad debt, we'll bail you out.
There was an implicit guarantee given to the government in this quasi-public company, Freddie and Fanny, that if they buy bad debt and the debt goes bad, the taxpayer will bail them.
Well, we have bailed them out, $200 billion, and now that may not be enough.
Article today, where was it in the Post today?
Someplace that Freddie and Fannie are going through money like presidents through an intern.
And so you got a situation where government created this crisis.
Now, everybody blames Wall Street.
Chris Dodd likes to say the reckless and careless and unscrupulous actors in the mortgage lending industry.
I would do the same thing.
And if I were on Wall Street, I'd create exotic investments.
I'd write credit default swaps if I knew that all those investments and all those swaps were based upon a mortgage that was guaranteed by Uncle Sam.
That's called socializing risk and privatizing profit.
There was no downside.
Why not do it?
Well, they did it.
They did it in spades.
And so the whole leveraging came crashing down, but it was fundamentally a failure of government intervention.
Indeed, Sarkozy was right.
The French president not long ago, Nicholas Sarkozy, said that this financial crisis, quote, is not a crisis of capitalism.
It is a crisis of a system that has distressed itself or distanced itself, I should say, from the most fundamental values of capitalism, which betrayed the spirit of capitalism.
President Bush reiterated that yesterday, saying this is not a failure of the free market, and the market goes up.
Now, I don't think that's a happenstance.
I tell you what I think the market's looking for is some certainty here.
The market, I mean, they don't like instability.
I don't like instability.
The markets don't like instability.
They're putting off investment.
One of the reasons the banks aren't lending and the bailout has failed to solve the credit crunch in a meaningful way is they have no idea what their debtor's balance sheet really looks like.
Why don't they have any idea?
Because the government keeps propping up these companies.
The government keeps injecting capital, buying up troubled assets.
Now they've got a third approach, according to TARP.
The Treasury Secretary this week said, well, first we were going to, what, buy troubled assets, and then we were going to inject direct liquid help into the banks.
And now they've got a new target, frozen consumer debt.
And Freddie and Fannie, who lost $29 billion in the third quarter, now say they're going to modify loans and take further write-downs.
You know what that means for you?
Freddie and Fannie buy one of those countrywide loans at $300,000, and now they say, well, in order to keep people in their homes and keep housing prices up, we're going to tell that debtor, just pay us back $150,000.
$200,000 will do.
The other $100,000, we're going to pay that.
We're going to pay that.
You know, as I went back to talk about the 1930s, this is a very, very familiar scenario.
We've tried increased government spending.
We've tried bailouts.
We're going to empower unions now with no secret ballots anymore.
And President-elect Obama is talking about a $500 billion stimulus plan, which will merely replace demand in the private sector for demand in the public sector as though those bureaucrats would know exactly where to put the money.
Detroit?
GE wants loan guarantees.
American Exchange wants to get on the Fed balance sheet.
Where does the bailouts end?
Who's going to bail out the dollar when pretty soon Treasury bills aren't worth their face value because we've accumulated so much debt in the bailouts, we can't pay it back.
There is no free lunch.
And the critics of the bailout were right.
A number of economists who were not heard, a few members of Congress, a few talk show hosts were right.
This was never going to work.
It didn't work with Bear Stearns.
It didn't work with Fannie and Freddie.
It didn't work with IndyMac and FDIC.
The bailout, the $700 billion TART program really hasn't worked, and the stimulus bills won't work.
What will work?
Well, what will work is to pledge to the United States citizen that we will never ever have a Freddie and Fanny again to light the matchstick that set off this fire.
We will dismantle those outrageous institutions, and we will not guarantee anybody's debt anymore.
Secondary mortgage buying is going to be done in the private market, and people aren't going to buy bad debt, and that's going to be encouragement not to write it.
We're going to have to let the market find its natural bottom, let it correct, and that means, yes, housing prices may go down a bit more before they start to turn up.
But if government artificially props it up, you're prolonging the pain, and you're creating a bigger crisis when that bubble bursts.
I'm Jason Lewis, in for Rush Limbaugh on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
1-800-282-2882, the contact line on this open line Friday.
Jason Lewis, thankful once again to be sitting in for Rush Limbaugh, El Rush Bow, taking a couple of days off.
He will be back on Monday.
In the meantime, check out RushLimbaugh.com.
Back to the calls we go.
First up, this segment, let's try, let's see here.
John in Tulsa, Oklahoma, you've been waiting a while.
Welcome to the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hi, Jason.
It's a privilege.
I'm calling about HDTV.
People have no idea what it's going to do to us.
In our area, the CBS affiliate audio comes on every FM radio.
For 40 years, I've listened to Channel 6 News at noon.
I have pocket radios that receives TV sound and does the pocket TVs.
Most of my television viewing is away from home.
Starting next February, I'll never have TV away from home again.
In December, we had an ice storm.
95% of citizens lost power.
Are you around watching TV?
John, are you reading something?
I'm just talking off the top of my head.
Oh, wow.
Let's get around watching pocket TVs and listening to TV sound.
We will no longer be allowed television in an emergency.
It's going away.
Well, can't you get a ⁇ I'm told you can get a box that will convert the analog signal into an HD DV signal.
Okay, we don't need just one or two boxes.
You need a box for the living room TV, a box for the DVD, VCR, and DVDs don't have a tuner.
You need a box for the bedroom, for the guest room, for the bedroom.
Well, you got a government bailout program going with this thing.
They got a $40 coupon.
But the boxes won't work in an emergency.
And they have proposed a battery-powered box which runs off a D-sized battery.
So you'll have literally buckets of batteries.
And there's no portable TVs.
There's no money.
I'm partisan.
Hey, I'm partisan here.
You know what I would do if I were you?
What's that?
Listen to the radio.
Well, they're trying to take that away, too, with HD radio.
So you think it's all a conspiracy?
Well, there is a conspiracy theory.
There has been at least a dozen people tell me that these boxes can transmit.
And if they can, and this will be the device from 1984, and that would be the connection to Obama, because I believe he's going to actually cause a terrorist event, and then the boxes will be the surveillance.
He's going to institute a citizen security force.
So I don't know what's going to happen.
So there is a website that the biggest of...
You know what I hate?
You know what I hate?
I've got to be honest with you, John, what I hate, I hate when the antenna in my head come out during watching HDTV because it gives me a really weird signal.
Look, let us not, let us not go down the road too far and ruin the credible criticisms of Barack Obama.
Obviously, we're not excited about what's in store for the United States of America.
But remember, in order to be credible, in order to have the I told you so scenario happen, which I think will, I think this administration is going to be much more remnant of Jimmy Carter as opposed to, say, the Clinton 90s growth, if you want to call it that, we've got to maintain our credibility.
That's all I'm going to say on that.
Wayne in Alabama, Coleman, Alabama, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hi.
Jason, what a privilege to be on with you.
And I'm bursting at the seams.
I've been just going crazy for a month now trying to get out the things that I feel and understand business.
I run a small trucking company and been in transportation for over 20 years.
And, you know, I've worked the ports for inbound steel.
I've worked in the steel and domestic steel hauling and all those things do is transfer from one to the other.
But the real point of my call is the economy and how it relates to building the jobs back up.
If we're to go after the 40-plus power plants that are currently in our country right now, if we were to go for, and I do understand to the opponents of drilling that, well, you know, we cannot supply all of our own needs.
I don't really know that, but say we did go domestically after all that we could fulfill millions and millions of tons of steel, cement, raw materials that it would take to erect these sources of energy, the hundreds of thousands, if not going over the million mark,
of construction jobs that would almost instantly be available in the erecting of these edifices.
And by the way, the private capital is more than willing to do that if the government just lets them.
But here's what the Democrats and a few green Republican governors would say to you.
Well, we can create green jobs.
In fact, Governor Peleni of Minnesota just did a fly around in this state promoting free markets?
No.
Tax cuts?
No.
Energy from our most abundant sources?
Coal?
No.
He promoted green jobs, wind, solar, biofuels.
And what they will tell you, Wayne, is we can make the same government make work jobs by having the government mandate that investment instead of going to coal, instead of going to oil, we will divert it and have it go to green jobs.
What do you think about that?
Well, I think the American citizens better make a decision.
Do you want a strong economy?
Or do you want to worry about abortion or somehow that don't have a nest to live in?
Because this economy is a 757 doing a nosedive.
I got you.
And energy is a crucial part of that.
I think your points are all well taken.
The question is, should government direct investment or should markets and consumers direct it?
I opt for the latter.
We are back on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network with me, Jason Lewis, Minnesota's real anchor man, filling in for El Rushbo today from the Northern Command.
Glad to be back and talk with you once again.
Always a pleasure.
1-800-282-2882.
Right to the phones we go this time.
Let's try Sharon in Ponta Verdra, California.
You are on the Rush Limbaugh Program.
Hi, Jason.
How are you?
I am very well.
Thank you, ma'am.
Good.
I have a request.
I have a plead for action at the groundroots.
We travel 35 weeks a year as a family.
And I talk to so many people all over the country, and they're frustrated.
And I get it, but they want marching orders.
You know, I think one of our great virtues is individual initiative, but we need to be jump-started.
We need somebody to tell us this is what you need to do.
We need a checklist every week.
Okay, go on Rush's website.
Here's what we can do this week to make it better for us because people don't know what to do.
Well, the only honest thing an environmentalist ever said was think globally, but act locally.
And I do believe that conservative America needs to quit looking for a now.
I do think charismatic, competent leadership is crucial, but that's not what the liberals who have had some success recently have done.
They have infiltrated the grassroots, the lower offices, the statehouse races, the county commissions, the city councils.
If you can control those and let the movement percolate upward and for the next generation to move into the state house and then in the governor's mansions or the senate, whatever, I think you've got a much better shot.
A lot of times we look for a great presidential leader.
We look for a senator.
And we let the lower races go to the left.
And then all of a sudden we find that our counties are increasing the welfare conduit that they dispense.
And our state houses are run by these neo-Marxists in so many state houses.
I think it behooves us as a movement to remember everything is local.
Tip O'Neill was right about that.
It is local.
And if you start local and you pick one race in Ponte Verdra, all right, I'm going to focus on this city council race.
I'm going to focus on this county commission race and make a change at the grassroots level.
As you mentioned, it will percolate up.
I think we've abandoned that, don't you?
Absolutely.
But what I see, I mean, I talk to CEOs of large companies.
I talk to security guards.
I talk to volunteers.
I talk to everybody.
Their frustration is inside their heart, but they don't take it and put it anywhere.
If Rush had a website and said, okay, this is what I want you to do today, I want you to talk to 10 people that voted for Obama.
Why do you need to wait for a leader?
You're not a follower.
You're a doer.
I am a doer.
Absolutely.
But I think if it's in front of us, that's what I'm saying.
There's 46 million people.
It's a great workforce.
People believe, and they are so upset about the way our country's headed, the philosophies.
And I will talk to anybody.
I talked to a guy on the airplane who was from New York.
He's an IT guy.
And I said, who are you voting for?
And he says, Obama.
And I said, tell me why.
I mean, and I sat here and told him about economics, about Joe DePlumber.
He had never heard of him.
And he said, I'm not giving my money to anybody.
And I'm like, he says, I've never heard it said that way.
I will concur this far that there has been a horrible lack of leadership in Republican politics for quite some time now.
And frankly, I think it started with a kinder, gentler nation going back after Reagan when we decided to throw in the towel that conservatism is just too hard.
There was this great anecdote I read years ago, Sharon, about Reagan being presented.
And everybody always criticizes people like me going back to Reagan.
But regardless of whether you like Reagan or not, the guy did believe in something.
He did not mollify his views in 1968 when he first lost, in 1976 when he lost.
And he was hated by the establishment.
They accused him of bringing down Gerald Ford, an incumbent president.
He was hated, but he kept persevering.
And he actually did some of the things he said he was going to do.
He believed in his convictions.
Obviously, they were real.
They had the courage of his convictions.
Someone presented him with a poll in the White House.
He said, Mr. President, you're wrong about this, according to the American people.
Now, did he say, well, gosh, let's have a focus group.
Let's take a look at the poll and how we can change our position.
He said, well, we'll just have to do a better job of educating the people.
Part of being a leader is telling the people, quite frankly, when they're wrong.
Right.
And we have not been willing to do that as a movement.
And that does pertain to what you're saying about leadership.
But that still doesn't stop people from taking back their local communities.
Well, give us marching hours.
Put that on a website.
This is what you can do.
Go to your city council, ask them how you can do it.
Go to your state.
You know, I mean, people just don't have that organization.
They don't have the ability to do it.
And I'd love to do it.
I'd love to start a website, you know, Dollars for Democracy, Take Our Country Back, whatever it is, to get the word out because people want to help, but they don't know how.
So anything y'all can put up or help us at the local levels and anywhere.
I mean, I see it all.
Well, let me ask you a question.
Let me ask you a question, Sharon.
Why don't you put it up?
I'm going to.
I mean, I lay in bed every night wanting to do something.
That's how important it is.
Well, that's how it starts.
And I will do it.
I mean, I will get in touch with Rush.
I will get in touch with Nude.
I'll get in touch with Sean Hannity.
There has got to be a way to do it right and do it effectively.
I got to let you go, but I think we really need to disabuse ourselves of this notion that we need somebody else.
We need this.
You know, one of the things that disturbed me during this cycle was these massive throngs of people and the idolatry, the fawning, the obsequious nature of these throngs, these crowds going to Barack Obama.
I thought I was seeing Ava Perrone in pants.
And it just smacks me as a banana republic looking for a messiah, as Rushes want to say.
I just found that very odd.
It looked like something out of Argentina where they're going to nationalize your 401ks, and Democrats here are taking a look at that, according to reports.
You look at this and you say, wait a minute, you start to give up your autonomy because I need a leader and whatever the leader says is good, I get a little nervous.
This nation was not founded upon charismatic leaders.
It was founded upon a principle.
We're a nation of mutts.
We don't have bloodlines that keep us together.
We were founded upon a consensus of individual liberty and limited government and the rule of law, which includes private property.
And that's the cohesiveness that keeps us together.
That's what we need to rediscover individually.
And these people who were all buffaloed by Barack, who are buffaloed by the Dems, they will get their comeuppance when we get a Jimmy Carter-style stagflation going.
You cannot inject this much liquidity into a market that is naturally where you've got money velocity slowing down.
When this money and this economy starts to heat up again, which eventually it will, the Federal Reserve has flooded this economy with so much fiat money.
That's not wealth.
That's just more money chasing fewer goods that we're going to see combined with Barack's tax rates, low production, stagnation, plus inflation.
If history is any guide.
And when that happens, that guy you're talking to, that IT guy, is going to do a 180, just like they did for Reagan, if we're patient and stick to our guns and be the opposing party with principle.
They're going to turn back to somebody.
The question is, if we're a Me Too Democrat Party, if we're a Me Too a liberal or conservative light movement, they're not going to turn to us.
They're going to be turning to the people from now on going forward who have decided to rediscover the roots of the American experiment and say, markets work, bailouts don't.
Taxes encourage productivity, and that's what government should be doing because when we're all more productive, we all gain and we don't have to steal.
You know, I'm on a roll here.
Don't stop me.
There are two ways to get wealth in society.
One is to make everybody more productive.
And when everybody's more productive at work, you create more widgets, you sell more, everybody can gain, and you don't have to, you know, rip off your neighbor because everybody is producing more and everybody gains.
It's a rising tide.
Here's the other way to get wealth.
Take it from other people against their will.
That is the liberal socialist Democrat version today.
It never works because sooner or later, people will not work perpetually for the benefit of not themselves, but of strangers.
They won't do it.
And when you add the kind of injections of liquidity that the Fed and the government has done, the government is soaking up private capital for these deficit finance stimulus packages.
That's private capital that could go to make everybody more productive.
It's not going to do it.
It's going to build a bridge to nowhere, a rainforest in Iowa.
It's going to go to unemployment compensation.
That makes everybody more productive.
So you've got this draining of private capital, which is going to reduce productivity.
You've got high marginal tax rates, which is also going to reduce profit and productivity.
And you've got more money than you can shake a stick at floating around when the credit crunch thaws, which it naturally will eventually.
And my prediction is you're going to see a Jimmy Carter scenario unless Barack Obama does a 180 and fights his own party, which I doubt.
In Cocoa Beach, Florida, here's Mark on EIB.
Hi.
How are you doing?
My question was about conservatism.
I agree.
I'm sold on the idea.
I've listened to the show for years, but I don't see how it works for me.
I mean, I see how it's like the larger economy.
But for me, as an individual, there's...
Well, I disagree with your premise.
The government and free markets and limited constitutional government is not going to do anything for you.
You do that for yourself.
The question is, are you going to have the ability to do that for yourself?
Or are we going to live in a nanny state where the federal government takes over the auto industry and then they control it and make cars nobody wants?
I mean, this ⁇ I got a break, but when I come back, let me try to dovetail off of what you just said and go back and quote JFK and tell you why I think he was wrong.
It's a perfect time to do that.
I'm Jason Lewis, in for El Rushbo on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Once again, having more fun than a human being should be allowed.
Fill it in for El Rushbo.
I'm Jason Lewis.
Minnesota's Mr. Wright on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Continuing now with Mark in Cocoa Beach, Florida.
Mark, let me ask you a question.
What do you think you're entitled to from government?
I don't think I'm entitled to anything from government other than they just do their job.
Well, then why are you calling and saying, what's in it for me from conservatism?
Well, because I don't understand it, and I think there's probably other people out there in the same situation.
Well, I'll tell you what's in it for you.
The freedom to go out and earn as much money as you want.
The freedom to have markets allocate resources, low energy costs, instead of having to subsidize alternative energy that is not very efficient.
The freedom to live under the laws which your state creates.
The freedom to move from one state to another if you choose.
The freedom to think and express yourself.
The purpose of government, and remember what government is.
It is the only institution in society that we give a monopoly on force to, to which we give a monopoly.
No institution.
You know, all the talk about the antitrust nonsense that liberals love to spout and all the big business and all of that.
None of them can force you to buy their product.
Not one.
Not big oil, not big pharmaceutical, not big tobacco, none of them.
Only government has a legal monopoly on force that can tell you you've got to pay for services you don't use every April 15th or we will throw you in jail.
Because of that power, unlimited power, the framers thought government should only be used as an instrument of freedom.
It's not a national charity.
It's not to take money from taxpayer A to give to taxpayer B.
And yet I sense in your question that that's, and I'm not accusing you of being a left-wing liberal.
I just sense that what's in it for me stems from that ideology.
Now, I can see what you're saying, but I never said what's in it for me.
I said I don't understand it.
I don't understand.
Well, here's the fundamental premise that I think is erroneous, and that is government ought to make us happy and make certain we don't go through the normal vicissitudes of life, whether it's in your portfolio or whether it's having a good day or a bad day.
Government is not there to regulate prices.
It's not there to solve a shortage in the markets.
It's not even there to tell you that gasoline prices are too high or too low.
It is there to let markets work and let you decide and create more and solve shortages.
And we've gotten on this bandwagon, and this is one of the things, or one of the reasons I think Democrats have won recently, is we now have a generation, and a couple of generations, raised on government goodies.
And they think government is there to redistribute wealth, not to allow a system that creates it.
And so they want more.
Right, right.
And where we're losing a lot of support is people like me don't understand how people succeed.
Well, can you, I mean, think about this for a moment.
All of the wonderful things in society, from jet engines to the internal combustion engine, I don't want to traumatize Al Gore too much, but that's one of the greatest inventions of our time, the automobile, to heating and cooling, to travel, to a great piece of music.
All of those were created by free individuals.
They weren't created by some bureaucrat in the Department of Housing and Urban Development when government cannot give anybody anything without first destroying and taking something from somebody else.
So we've got to convince Americans that government is there to give you freedom and responsibility.
And liberals are there to take away both.
And that's getting back to basics.
Now, if you're saying that's not going to convince people because people want something, then we have a crisis in America.
We have a crisis in what the American experiment was supposed to be about.
And maybe we do.
Well, somewhat.
But I think there's a difference.
A lot of people don't disagree.
They just don't understand.
Well, we're educating them.
We're trying.
Now, I will say this.
If, in fact, you, you know, to get to beat electorally this government has an act of plunder, legal plunder, which is what it's become, most of what government does is in the category of transfer payments, taking money from one person and giving to another.
And, you know, that's something that you or I couldn't do on the street without being accused of a crime, and yet we hire members of Congress to do it on a daily basis.
But to get around that, if you have the right economic policies, for instance, you will see a rising tide of private economic growth.
People will all make more money.
They'll feel better, and they won't feel the need for a handout, and then they'll vote for free market conservatives.
I do think there's an equilibrium here.
I wouldn't despair too much, Mark.
I think what's going to happen is socialism fails.
It always does.
I don't want to go through it, but it's going to fail.
And then people are going to return, I think, or look towards something different.
Now, there's also a moral dimension to this.
Regardless of the economics of all of this, do you really, does government really have the right to take what somebody else has privately earned and redistribute it?
No.
Did we not fight a great civil war about the right to keep the fruits of your labor?
Correct.
So you can argue on a moral plane that, look, hey, let's end slavery.
Let's cut taxes.
And I think, frankly, that's probably the better argument when you're talking to your friends, that taxes are not an economic issue.
They're a moral issue.
And if you don't have the right to keep the fruits of your labor, what other rights do you have?
The bottom line is this.
The only thing that a freedom-loving party, a freedom-loving movement, can offer people in the aspect of their relationship with the state is freedom and responsibility that goes with it.
Democrats say, don't worry about being responsible.
And by the way, we'll take your freedom as well while we're at it.
I'm Jason Lewis on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
One more hour coming up on this open line Friday.
I'm Jason Lewis in for El Rushbo, high atop the Northern Command Tower, as they say.
Watching that Al Frank and Norm Coleman center race for you as well.
We'll take more calls on that, more calls on the bailout.
We've got some other global warming news coming up.
But I do want to get back to Mark because this is a premise that's been bothering me, and I know it's bothered Rush for quite some time.
We've got to focus on not your relationship to one another.
Somebody needs help.
They should help them.
That's fine.
Man's relationship to man.
I'm using that gender term inclusively.
When government comes in, it's your relationship to government that we need to kind of winnow down.
That's a totally different relationship.
Man's relationship to the state as opposed to somebody else.
Charity is a private affair.
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